All posts by Laurens Rutten

Graphic that shows a bird's eye view of pedestrians, a bicycle, an electric car, and a metro carriage.

Car electrification must go hand-in-hand with promoting alternatives to car use

Consumers must be able to break out of a mobility system that fundamentally relies on fossil fuels. Both car electrification as well as the promotion of alternatives to car use are needed here.

and / December 5, 2023

Use price to change our transport habits

We can clean up our mobility system without it feeling like an uncomfortable sacrifice. This requires fair price signals and incentives that make sustainable transport options affordable and attractive.

, and / October 30, 2020

3 conditions to make charging an electric car convenient

Electric cars must be easy to charge, if they are to move away from the sidelines and into the mainstream.

and / May 23, 2019
Stock picture showing a child's room. Consumer groups want all these products to fall under the same future EU market surveillance regime.

Improving safety checks for some, but not all, consumer products flies in the face of reason

When we purchase new toys, clothes or electronics, we expect these to be safe. This is where ‘market surveillance’ comes into play: our authorities making sure products conform to our laws through controls and inspections. And as we are in...

Picture that intends to showcase talks between regulators.

Making ‘open trade’ and the global market work for EU consumers

“Open trade must go hand in hand with open policy making,” Jean-Claude Juncker said in his annual State of the Union speech last week. With this statement he kicked-off changes in the way the European Commission conducts trade negotiations. His...

and / September 20, 2017

Making clean cars work for consumers in the 2020s

In the next decade, the automotive sector has a huge chance to rid itself of its bad-boy-Dieselgate tag and clean up the cars of the future. This means an investment in technologies that will cut emissions and the cost of...

and / May 5, 2017

EU-US consumer groups want to change trade deals: split ‘tariffs’ from ‘rules’

If you work in policy communications, you’ll be familiar with the amount of technical terms and acronyms that come with conferences full of experts. You’ll know how difficult it can be to make things understandable and to cut out the...

/ April 5, 2017

Want to build an international investment court that won’t go up in flames? Fix the underlying system!

Whether or not you are a trade aficionado or aficionada, you have likely noticed the glaring headlines about free trade deals between the European Union and Canada or the United States. A root cause of the controversy around these deals...

and / March 16, 2017

TTIP is hibernating. So let’s improve it.

At this point it’s perhaps a bit cliché to say it, but free trade is on shaky ground. Public support for trade liberalisation is waning, the Financial Times illustrated. This scepticism is very much highlighted by wrangling on a proposed...

and / November 25, 2016